Saturday, November 28, 2009

So I had a keg go empty yesterday. I had the second keg of The Pounder on stand by, but since it was cloudy in the first keg, I thought I'd transfer the second keg to another keg for serving. It seems to have carbonated nicely in the keg, so when I hooked on the jumper hose, it started transferring with no effort. Nice! Well, it got to about half way and I tried to bleed off pressure to keep the transfer going and I got a lot of foam out, spraying everywhere. So now I have 2 half kegs of this. I took one and put it on my empty garage tap. When I plugged in the gas hose, there was still so much pressure in the keg that it blew beer backwards into the gas tube, and sprayed beer out of the regulator. What a mess. That was the bad news.

The good news: I was cleaning out the fridge after the beer sprayed all over, and I opened the vegetable drawers at the bottom. I never use those, but it looked like beer had leaked in there. I found a bomber bottle of Winterfest from Sockeye! Score! It must have been given to me last Christmas, and I put it in the veggie drawer and forgot about it.

I popped it open a few minutes ago, and it is quite nice. It has a good, strong malt flavor, slightly smoky, and not very hoppy. Winterfest when fresh is a fairly hoppy beer, but since it has aged, the hops have mellowed significantly.